Fresh, friendly new take on third-person shooters. Addictive action. Steady updates have added a satisfying amount of content since launch.

Cons

No way to communicate with teammates. Local multiplayer limited to two players.

Bottom Line

Splatoon is a unique new shooter from Nintendo that throws away any sense of violence and replaces it with colorful fun.

You can trust Nintendo to make bright, colorful games that are accessible to anyone. It's just surprising to see that Nintendo did it with a multiplayer, squad-based shooter this time. Splatoon ($59.99) is a Nintendo Wii U game in which you play a cartoonish squid-boy or squid-girl equipped with a paint gun. You fight other squids in complex maps, but the main goal isn't to shoot them; it's to shoot everything else. Splatoon launched with only a handful of maps and one game mode, but it has since gotten a significant amount of free content, including three game modes, 11 different maps, and support for squads of friends. Splatoon's developed into a fun, satisfying shooter that earns our Editors' Choice.

Paint the TownTurf War is Splatoon's core multiplayer game mode, and it's a unique take on point-based territory-control game modes in other shooters. Your objective is to cover as much of the map as possible with your team's paint color. That's all that matters in this mode; shooting members of the other team is purely tactical, to prevent them from inking your territory and to get past their defenses to ink their territory. Kill/death ratios don't mean anything; it's all about how much territory is painted in your colors. Territory control is measured in points at the end of each round to show how well each player performed. This is a fantastic twist on traditional shooters that judge you primarily based on how many of the enemy you kill. Splatoon puts the most-lethal players in primarily support and defense roles, and forces teams to consider how to best paint the map. Unfortunately, Splatoon lacks in-game voice communication tools.

Roles are determined by weapons, which include the melee-only paint roller (which is fantastic for painting territory, but which leaves you vulnerable to anyone with a ranged weapon) and the sniper rifle-like charger (which can take out enemies in one shot when fully charged, but paints very little). Each weapon has its own sub-weapon (grenades, seeker bombs, and locator beacons) that uses the same paint as the main gun, and a special weapon you can activate once a meter charges from painting objects. You can't switch sub-weapons or special weapons, but variants on guns offer some variety with alternative loadouts.

You earn experience points and currency from each multiplayer match, and they're the key to making your character your own. Experience points let you get Fresh levels, which unlock new weapons and cosmetic items in the store. Once you hit level 10, you can compete online in Ranked Battles. In-game money is needed to buy these weapons, along with things like shirts, shoes, and headwear. Every cosmetic item has its own unique bonus, like letting you swim through ink faster or use less paint when shooting. Higher-level items have additional hidden bonuses that unlock as you get experience points while wearing them. All this adds a great sense of progression to the game, and it lets you tweak your character for your preferred play style.

Until you hit level 10, you're limited to three-minute Turf War games when playing online. After you unlock Ranked Battles, you can play other game types like Splat Zones and Tower Control. Splat Zones is a capture point mode where teams must paint different zones on each map to get dominance over an area, then defend that territory as a timer counts down to victory. Tower Control requires capturing a single tower in the same way, then protecting that tower as it moves along a track toward the enemy's base, resulting in a tense, fun push-and-pull dynamic.

The most recent addition, Rainmaker, is Splatoon's take on capture-the-flag. In it, both teams fight for the titular Rainmaker weapon, a powerful gun that creates devastating whirlwinds of paint, but requires a short time to charge before firing. The player with the Rainmaker has to take it to the enemy base and jump on a platform to win. Whenever the gun is dropped, it becomes protected by a force field either team has to saturate with paint to destroy and take control of it, which helps keep matches well paced and not simply frantic games of tag.

Splatoon's level cap was recently moved from 20 to 50, and new weapons and equipment have been steadily added to the game since its launch. Besides building levels and unlocking new equipment, you can also fight your way up through graded brackets with Ranked Battles, which start you at a C- grade and let you better your grade with victories (and lose points with losses). Each new grade causes the game to match you against tougher opponents.

Stealthy SquidsSplatoon offers a unique take on stealth tactics. Instead of a single spy or scout class, every player can hide and move quickly by swimming through paint. By holding the L button, you become a squid that can't fight but completely disappears in your team's paint. You also move much faster through your team's paint as a squid, and this is the most efficient way to recharge your own paint reserves, as well. However, enemy paint steadily damages you when you stand on it, and if you're a squid and the paint you're swimming through gets painted over, you die.

Respawns are extremely fast, and you can jump to any other active player on your team by tapping them on the Wii U GamePad touch screen. That said, when every drop of paint on the ground contributes to your team's score, every second counts. If your team gets taken out, you'll all be painting again in just a few seconds, but in that time the opposing team will have painted its way to your doorstep.

Light and QuietNintendo's unique brand of overbearing child protection is on full display in Splatoon. It's understandable to not want to expose kids to the remarkably hateful things said over voice chat in games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Halo, all games which, ironically, seem to be frequented by children who just discovered how to swear. Nintendo once again goes too far, however, in shielding kids. Not only is there no voice chat in Splatoon, but there aren't even any contextual tactical commands. The only way to communicate with your team is with two vague and redundant posed messages accessible through the direction pad: "C'mon!" and "Booyah!" After putting several hours into Splatoon, I still don't know what either message is supposed to mean, nor have I noticed anyone use them. If Nintendo wanted to protect children, it could have at least included a radial menu of a selection of basic tactical commands like "Go forward," "Come with me," and "Return to base." As it is, you'll need a completely separate voice communication system if you want to coordinate with your friends in the game.

Similarly, matchmaking is almost entirely automated. Teams are randomly assigned between matches in most modes, so you can't be certain you'll be playing on the same side as your friend even if you get into a game together. There are few options for game lobbies or match settings, and the steady cycling of maps means you can't even pick specific arenas for your matches. Regular battles and ranked battles each have pairs of maps from which the automated matchmaking randomly selects, and those pairs shuffle among the currently released maps in the game on a fairly regular basis.

Fortunately, Splatoon recently added a Squad Battle mode, where you can form a squad with one, two, or three friends. If you have three friends with you, you can fight in a standard 4-on-4 battle with your hand-picked squad. If you just have one friend, your pair can join with other pairs (automatically assigned) and face random four-player squads. And if you're a team of three, you can jump into 3-on-4 battles (recommended for experienced players). All Squad Battle modes are Ranked Battles, so you work to raise your grade as well as your level. It also has more complex capture objectives than just painting the entire map.

At launch, Splatoon only offered a handful of maps and felt very light on content for a $60 game. Now, however, the game has a solid 11 different maps and three game modes to keep things feeling fresh. More importantly, the action is consistently quick, accessible, and fun enough that it's easy to lose hours simply playing match after match. It's a testament to the excellent core of the game mechanics, even if there's very little control over what maps or modes you play.

Single-Player SplatteringBesides team-based multiplayer, you can play locally against a friend in a one-on-one match. One player uses the Wii U GamePad and the other uses another controller and the HDTV connected to the Wii U. It lets each player have a full screen, but it means local multiplayer is limited to two people, and the Wii U GamePad user can cheat by looking at the big screen. This type of game is begging for a four-player split-screen mode, and unfortunately that's not present.

Splatoon also offers a surprisingly lengthy single-player campaign. The zapfish that power Inkopolis have been stolen by evil octopuses, and you're sent by Captain Cuttlefish to retrieve them. The controls are the same as in the multiplayer mode, but instead of painting territory you need to get to the end of complicated levels full of different enemies and puzzles. Ultimately, the single-player campaign serves as a very long training sequence that steadily demonstrates increasingly complicated maneuvers you can do with paint. The levels are surprisingly varied, and there are even boss fights against giant octopus-driven machines. There are also hidden scrolls in each level that reveal something about the game world, and playing through the campaign unlocks additional weapons for use in multiplayer.

Amiibo SupportSplatoon offers very specific and relatively deep support for Amiibos, Nintendo's NFC-equipped figures. The game only works with official Splatoon Amiibos, of which there are only three (Boy Inkling, Girl Inkling, and Squid). However, each Amiibo unlocks an admirable amount of content. When you scan an Amiibo into the game through the Wii U GamePad's NFC zone, it brings up a Splatoon character who provides additional challenges based on the single-player missions. These challenges require you to run through several missions using a specific type of weapon, such as the sniper rifle-like Charger. Without Amiibos, you're limited to the special, upgradeable, single-player-only gun for these missions. Completing these challenges also unlocks five additional items per Amiibo, and each mission provides a generous amount of in-game cash for buying weapons and cosmetic upgrades for the multiplayer mode.

It's a shame that you can only access this content with Splatoon Amiibos, and not any of the dozens of other Amiibos from the Super Smash Bros. or Mario Party 8 lines. Even character-themed costume pieces from other Amiibos would have been more than welcome, considering how the game uses cosmetic items like shirts, shoes, and hats to distinguish players.

Fun GunsSplatoon takes an oversaturated genre and makes it feel fresh and new, thanks to a coat of paint. Well, thanks to several coats of paint, constantly replenished and gooped all over every map. It started out light on content, but Nintendo has fulfilled its promise to steadily offer new maps, modes, and items, and the gameplay itself remains incredibly addictive and fun. It's a refreshing change of pace for squad-based multiplayer shooters, even with its nearly complete dearth of communication options, and it earns our Editors' Choice as one of the best multiplayer games for the Wii U.

About the Author

Will Greenwald has been covering consumer technology for a decade, and has served on the editorial staffs of CNET.com, Sound & Vision, and Maximum PC. His work and analysis has been seen in GamePro, Tested.com, Geek.com, and several other publications. He currently covers consumer electronics in the PC Labs as the in-house home entertainment expert... See Full Bio

Splatoon (for Nintendo Wii U)

Splatoon (for Nintendo Wii U)

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